Colloquia

On Selling Digital Goods

Speaker: Adrian VettaMcGill University

Abstract:

Suppose you are a monopolist for a digital good. What pricing mechanism
should you use to sell the good? This sounds straightforward but there is a catch.
Specifically, such a monopolist is a form of duropolist and
Richard Coase (1972) conjectured that a duropolist has no monopoly power at all!
We discuss this problem and the various pricing mechanisms available to a duropolist.
We then examine the algorithmic implications involved and
quantify the extent to which a duropolist can, in fact, generate higher profits
than an equivalent monopolist.
(Joint work with Peter Sloan and Gerardo Berbeglia.)